Zournal (Book 1): It All Started

by Randall S. Merritt

  Regina opened up then, “Since you were nice enough to let us make fun of all your most intimate moments since the start of all this would you like to hear our story? I don’t think it is as riveting as yours but it may help us all put some pieces together. I’m sorry about Rhonda and John, they sounded like they were pretty nice people. Don’t blame yourself for that though, look how screwed up this world is.”

  I let Regina know I would very much like to hear their story. Gunny said to wait a minute and left and came back with two waters for me and Regina and a beer for himself. “Gotta stay hydrated.” So not cool watching him down that warm beer while I just had water. I soon forgot all about that though as they launched into their story. I’ve condensed it down from there constantly interrupting each other to add details that turned out to not matter or in some cases to not have been something that actually happened in the last few weeks. Gunny had been in so many tight spots around the world and was getting older so his stories sometimes ran together.

  Mark “Gunny” Napoli woke up at 6:30 AM without an alarm clock like he did pretty much every day. He rolled out of bed, started the coffee pot, and did his hundred pushups followed by a hundred sit-ups. Once he had completed those he walked over to the coffeepot and poured himself a big cup of coffee, throwing in three Splendas and a squirt of the Light Vanilla Creamer. Walking back over to the couch he sat down and hit the power button. As the TV came on and the emergency message started playing on a loop he stood up and went into the bedroom. He grabbed his Smith and Wesson 9 Millimeter and a couple of clips he had for it that he had been going to take to the range. He shoved the 9 MM in a holster that he clipped onto the inside back of his pants, pulling his shirt tail over it to easily conceal it.

  He went out to the garage and grabbed an Alice pack off the work bench. He went back inside and threw a first aid kit, a change of clothes and a Colt .45 with an extra loaded clip and a big Ziploc bag of loose ammo in it. Lastly, he walked over to his cupboard and pulled out 6 Meals ready to Eat (MRE) he had in there and shoved them in the bag. He carried the bag out to the garage where he pulled out some water bottles and used those to finish filling up the pack. With that accomplished he threw the pack on his back and climbed onto his pride and joy.

  The garage door went up automatically as he started the old Harley Softail he had walked in the night before. The noise in the garage was deafening. He smiled as he started pulling out onto the driveway. He gunned the engine one more time before something triggered his survival instinct that now would probably be a good time to go silent. Looking back over his shoulder he saw his seventy something year old neighbor running at him screaming, also, she was topless and definitely a bluish veiny color. He started to stop and help her when two more people in various stages of undress popped out from behind houses and started running at him. Pushing aside his initial instinct to draw his weapon he pulled quickly out onto the road and was gone before any of the people had gotten close enough to touch him.

  The smile long forgotten he flew down the road. He was worried. His daughter lived with her husband in a subdivision about five miles away from him. While Gunny did not have much to do with his daughter or her husband he absolutely doted on Regina. He had since the first time he had seen her at the hospital. He had missed out on a lot of time with his own daughter due to being deployed to hotspots around the world to kill bad guys. Seeing that sweet baby girl, he knew he had missed out on a lot. His daughter always laughingly accused him of turning Regina “Ginny” into a Tom boy. He took her camping, taught her to shoot a .22 Caliber rifle at targets, then later at squirrels. He was there when she learned to ride a bike and was always there for birthdays, to take her to dance class (she was not a complete Tom Boy!), and to soccer practice when that was her main interest for a couple of years.

  Ginny’s mom and dad had an extremely capable babysitter and Gunny was happy to just spend time with Ginny. Which is why he was now pushing the Harley past eighty on a road that was scary going fifty on. He wove through traffic and around people milling around on a street corner. Some of the people tried to come out and grab him but he just drove around them and kept going. He pulled into Ginny’s neighborhood and it was just starting to turn chaotic. He saw the messed up blue veined people trying to break into houses and in one case appearing to eat someone laying on the ground?

  He rode like a Wildman until he pulled into the driveway of his daughter’s house. Looking behind him he saw about seven of the infected looking people running down the road in his direction. Gunny ran up to the door to his daughter’s house and started banging on it. He saw the window shade move and then Ginny was looking at him through the glass. She was wearing an oversized shirt and her hair was sticking everywhere. She saw who it was and opened the door to let him in.

  Gunny asked her “Where is your mom and dad?”

  Ginny just looked at him with a confused expression. Obviously trying to figure out why her grandpa was standing here freaking her out early in the morning on a Wednesday.

  “They went for a run. They’ve been doing it for the last week or two. They’re on a health kick again which means there has not been any good food in this house for a week. Why?”

  Gunny asked if she knew when they were normally back. He listened with a sinking heart as Ginny consulted the clock on the stove and then said that they should have been back to wake her up to get ready for school over thirty minutes ago. Hearing yelling, they both looked out the front door which had been left open up until now. A large man wearing a white t-shirt and boxers with that veiny messed up look and red eyes was charging at them screaming like a banshee. At least two more of them were pretty close to being in the front yard right behind him.

  Gunny slammed and locked the front door.

  “Ginny, take the Colt out of my backpack, load it and if anything gets too crazy do not be afraid to shoot.”

  With hands trembling Ginny pulled the pistol out of her grandfather’s bag and slammed home the clip after checking it to make sure it was loaded. The front door was bouncing around from being pounded on at this point.

  “Ginny, in less than 30 seconds go to your room and put on some travelling clothes and get back in here. If anything doesn’t feel safe, don’t do it. “

  Ginny ran to her room. Gunny trained his 9MM on the front door. The big bay window in the kitchen broke and he could see that the people were trying to climb through it. They did not seem to care when their skin was slashed by the glass but just kept trying to pull themselves inside. The wood frame on the front door started cracking where the dead bolt was.

  “Stop or I will shoot!” yelled Gunny in the general direction of the people trying to get inside. As he had found out in other combat situations once it got real he became very focused. The only problem he was having with the focus was the stark unreality of the situation that was giving everything a dreamlike quality and the fact that the little girl running around looking for her boots was more important to him than anything else on this planet. Pulling the hammer back he waited for the door to break down. When it did he placed careful shots in the center of mass of each of the three people who tried to get in. He then stepped over their bodies and shot the two who were still trying to get in through the window.

  When he turned around Ginny was standing there fully dressed and holding the Colt in both hands. She had a stunned look on her face. Gunny ran to the whiteboard on the fridge and scribbled a note before grabbing Ginny, running outside and telling her to get on the bike.

  ‘dad was here. I am taking Ginny. Strawberry place.’

  Gunny dropped two more of the crazy people then jumped on the bike and got it started. Looking up and down the street he saw he was going to get swarmed so he cut through the neighbor’s yard and went on the street on the other side of the houses. The normal caution he would have shown with Ginny on the bike was nowhere to be seen today as he sped and dodged his way out of the neighborhood and out to the feeder road to the 520. He saw veh
icles parked all over the road with the owners missing. He saw a cop laying on the ground screaming while two people tore at his face with their hands and more people stumbled in that direction. Everywhere they rode, he could tell the roar of his engine was attracting attention. Necks would quickly turn snapping those awful red eyes into place to stare at him and Ginny. The only thing that kept them from building up a huge entourage was that there was noise coming from everywhere so the people chasing them would get distracted and go after the easier prey.

  Finally hitting the intersection, Gunny turned hard left and aimed to go between several cars that were currently locked in a gridlock as the red eyed pan handlers of death tried to beat their way into the people’s cars. Some people were smashing into one another, some seemed oddly detached and were just sitting in traffic like it was a normal day. As he was buzzing through them he saw at least one guy get out of his car to look at the damage he sustained getting rear ended. One of the red eyed veiny people had him on the ground and was trying to bite his eyes out within about 15 seconds of the guy getting out of his car.

  Seeing the one guy getting taken down and eaten right in front of them, the other motorists freaked out and started running into each other and doing whatever they could to ty and escape. As he sped past the entrance to a large apartment complex, all Gunny heard behind him was crashing noises and the screams of the veiny crazy people as they dove in to try and beat their way into the cars with the people. Glad he had not been a few minutes later he continued to hurl them down the road at top speed. Praying he would not hit anything he made it through the next small town Ok and continued screaming towards the cutoff to the strawberry field he had taken his daughter and granddaughter to once or twice a year for the last eight years.

  He slowed down as he got to a point where a roadblock was in the process of being setup. Several cars were already queued up to go through the roadblock. He rode right past all of them and right up to the uniformed National Guard Sergeant who was currently stopping cars from going through while yelling at his men to get the concertino wire deployed.

  The sergeant looked up at him and grunted for him to get back in line.

  “Sergeant, I’m Master Sergeant Napoli. The situation behind me is totally FUBAR. I need to get thought this roadblock and up the road to where I am meeting my daughter.”

  The sergeant looked up, still annoyed but with a measure of respect in his voice now. “Sorry Master Sergeant, our orders are not to let any one pass through this checkpoint until we have been told otherwise. Our job is to keep the FUBAR on that side of our wire.”

  Gunny looked back at him, “Doesn’t seem like you have enough guys to really keep out the level of FUBAR that is coming down this road behind me. If you got a safe place I can stash my granddaughter I can man a post for you. I’d rather have her safe and sound on the right side of the guys with the big guns.”

  “Best offer I’ve had in a while Master Sergeant. Come on through, your girl can hang out in one of the Humvees in the back. She should be safe there. If you can handle a fifty I have one over there that I could really use someone on if push comes to shove.”

  With that the Sergeant let the Master Sergeant “Gunny” USMC Retired, come through the gate. The people in the cars behind him started honking and yelling but the sergeant walked over to them with his M16 and put a pretty quick end to all that foolishness. Gunny got Ginny settled in the Humvee at the back of the lot, where she was out of the way but he could easily keep an eye on her from his post. The other guys got the wire laid out and came back to get into position. Meanwhile, the line of cars kept getting longer, the honks more frequent and frantic. A car pulled out of the line and accelerated towards the fence with no signs of slowing.

  Gunny walked a large amount of high caliber, high velocity rounds into the ground in front of the car and the driver reconsidered running the gate, the car skidded to an abrupt stop. Gunny moved the barrel of the .50 up so that it was staring at the guy behind the wheel of the pale Mercedes. The guy threw the car in reverse and started heading away from the large gun aimed at him before slipping the car off and into the weeds where it looked like one of the tires fell in a hole and the whole car trembled to a jarring stop. Not a lot happened after that for the rest of the day. People sat in their cars. People used the restroom. It was Florida so everyone was hot and unhappy, even in December.

  The Sergeant kept checking in on the radio but no new orders were issued. As night fell he walked over to Gunny. Leaning into the Humvee he coughed so Gunny would know he was there. Then he started talking on a conversational whisper.

  “Do you think we’ll hold this position? The news I am getting over the radio is not good. Some of the other roadblocks have been overrun and no one has even heard from them in hours.”

  Gunny looked over the haggard looking Sergeant. “I give it until tomorrow morning before those red eyed blue skinned devils are breathing down on our necks. After they’ve gone through all the people you have lined up on the road out there. Once they get here we will not be able to stop them.”

  The Sergeant coughed again, “I agree Master Sergeant. What I am going to do is not look behind me for about ten minutes. If someone were to grab their granddaughter out of a Humvee and jump on their bike and head off down the road I do not have the manpower to pursue them. I think I may end up being the reason all these people in front of us die. Be nice to be responsible for one person living.”

  With that said, the Sergeant walked away to check on his men. Gunny hopped down and went to the Humvee to get Ginny out and moving. Ginny was sitting up already and staring at him. When told to get on the bike she hopped right out and jumped on. Gunny shouldered the Alice pack with their gear in it and they roared on down the road.

  It did not seem like long at all before they were turning right down the road next to the Strawberry / Paint Ball place. Having been here multiple times Gunny and Ginny knew if you kept going past the barn there was a big two story home after that and then strawberry fields and the woods where people paid for the privilege of running around and pelting each other with balls full of paint. Gunny and Ginny had been those people a few times and it had always been a bad day for the opposing team.

  Pulling into the yard they had shut off the Harley and approached the front doors. Noting the lights were on and hoping to find normal people still living in the house Gunny put his gun behind his back and knocked on the door. A couple of seconds later there was a loud bang on the door. Followed by more hammering on the door. Then the window by the front door started taking some hits. Gunny pulled back and walked down the stairs to wait calmly below the level of the door for them to come out.

  Two of them did come out. Gunny sent them both to hell. Then they walked into the house and saw a third one laying on the couch. The young boy had a fan aimed at himself. He looked to be around 8 years old. He was dressed in just a tiny pair of superman underoos His body was veiny; his eyes were covered in some sort of gunk seeping out and Gunny was sure if the eyes opened he would see red. Gunny aimed his weapon but could not bring himself to pull the trigger. Ginny went into the kitchen and quietly rummaged through drawers until coming up with some tape. Circling around the couch they quickly wrapped the blanket around the boy and started taping around the blanket nice and solid. The boy woke up and started screaming but he could not move his arms. He swung his head around, gnashing his teeth trying to bite either Gunny or Ginny, but could not get at either of them.

  Not knowing what else to do with him they put him in a closet and locked the door. After a while the boy stopped screaming. Opening the door instantaneously caused more screaming. Trying to feed him or give him water was an exercise in futility as he swelled up with anger as soon as he saw one of them. They considered letting him go but that seemed like a bad idea for numerous reasons. He is still in the closet and still has not eaten or drank anything and is still going strong. Eyes bright red and visible body covered in veins. He ‘sleeps’ unless som
eone opens the door then he freaks out.

  Exploring this place has been good. The owners were gun nuts so they have a collection of rifles and literally buckets of loose ammo. They use the buckets people put the strawberries in and have those full of ammo. They have canned fruit and a ton of other supplies from the small Farmers Market they run here by the Strawberry fields. Gardening tools and seeds. Tractors.

  The next thing of note to share was when some moron rolled up behind the barn in a Humvee and passed out in plain sight of the world!

  Entry 23: Bootcamp

  My first question after the story was if I could see the guns. Gunny held up his arms, flexed and asked if I was enjoying gazing at the guns. Then he asked me if I had any experience with weapons other than the big, dull knife I was lugging around everywhere. The actual answer to that was ‘yes’, my dad was a marine after all, I did have a bit of familiarity with firearm basics. Most of which bulled down to sayings like “Red is Dead” to tell you how to use the safety, “Never point a gun at something unless you plan to kill it”, and various other firearm training clichés. My dad had loved it when he handed me a double barrel shotgun at the age of ten with two 12 gauge shells in it and I pulled both triggers at once, blasting myself backwards onto the ground and making my shoulder hurt for about a week. To be fair to him, it does seem pretty funny looking back on it.